ABSTRACT
The author quotes the passage to show the nature of his appeal to Good Sense and as a forewarning of its dangers. But the points here to consider are whether the doctrine of Imagination can supply conclusive arguments in such cases, and where Good Sense comes in. But it brings out very clearly the relation, for Coleridge, between two senses of principle as conscious reflective thought and as controlling tendency. Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into a graceful and intelligent whole. This is a peroration in an eighteenth-century manner, not designed to be taken too seriously. Coleridge comes nearest to stating the place of Good Sense in criticism in a later passage, where he is discussing Wordsworth's view that poetic diction is 'arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices, upon which no calculation whatever can be made'.
